


The Night Will Always Win

by Anonim



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Night Terrors, Surrogate father Gil Arroyo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 02:07:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21189791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonim/pseuds/Anonim
Summary: “The night will always win.The night has darkness on its side.”At dawn, Gil is there, and come daytime, the damage of the night might slowly be undone.





	The Night Will Always Win

Malcolm woke suddenly, staring at the ceiling as his chest rose and fall with each quick and hard breath he took through the mouth guard. Disoriented, it took him a second or two to gather himself and sit up, fumbling with shaky hands to unfasten his restraints and get rid of the mouth guard.

His breathing still hadn’t calmed, and now he could hear a sort of wheezy quality to it, like he was... He brought his shaky fingers to his face and felt dampness. He was crying.

He wiped his face and rubbed at his eyes as he sniffled and slowly stood up from his bed. Sunshine must have stirred, because as he began walking towards the bathroom, she began chirping.

At the sink, he washed his face with cold water and looked up at his reflection. He looked about as horrible as he expected.

’You’re a mess,’ he breathed. ’Pull yourself together.’

The nightmare was just that this time: a nightmare. Not a memory. But somehow, it hit just as hard.

It started off fairly normal. He’d called the police, and Gil showed up at the door. So far, so good. Dr Whitly had let him in and started making the tea. But when Malcolm showed up, he couldn’t talk. He couldn’t warn the policeman, couldn’t make a sound or move a muscle.

His father handed the cup to Gil, all the while looking at Malcolm, and the policeman politely accepted it and took a few sips. Malcolm felt himself yell and scream, trying to break out of whatever it was that didn’t let him move, but it was no use. Gil drank the tea and collapsed, shattering the cup on the ground. After that, everything became hazy, hard to follow, but he could tell that his father was slowly and painfully murdering Gil, all the while smiling at _him_, like he wanted to teach him a lesson. _This is what happens to people who try to help you, Malcolm._

That’s when he woke up. Back by his bed, he checked the time. 4:38 AM.

Great. Gil and the team will be overjoyed to hear he’s gotten a solid 4 hours of sleep tonight.

As he started on his morning routine (no way was he going to be able to fall asleep again), he wondered how many more days of barely any sleep or food he could power through before his body threw in the towel. Apparently, he was stubborn enough to have been able to keep it up so far, and only had hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation on about two or three separate occasions. That had to count for something.

A couple of hours later found him sitting in the kitchen, hoping for an unfortunate early morning jogger to run into a horribly mutilated dead body that he could sink his metaphorical claws into.

‘That’s fucked up,’ he muttered to himself at the thought.

Just because he couldn’t sleep didn’t mean he didn’t feel tired or sleepy. Even rested on top of the counter, his arms felt heavy and his head dull, and he could practically feel the bags weighing down his eyelids.

When he tried to make some food earlier, just the sight of it made his stomach churn, and so he gave up on having breakfast. Maybe a bit later…

_As if._

His phone rang so suddenly and so loudly it made him jump, and he fumbled to fish it out of his pocket.

_Gil_.

That man was a godsend. Malcolm took a few seconds to push the intruding memories of his latest nightmare out of his mind before he answered the call. He tried not to sound too eager when Gil told him about the unfortunate jogger that stumbled upon a horribly mutilated dead body… Well, it wasn’t a jogger, but an old lady walking her dog, and the body wasn’t exactly mutilated, but apparently messed-up enough to get Malcolm involved.

He showed up at the scene about half an hour later, dressed in one of his usual three-piece suits that started to get just a bit loose on him.

On the way to the crime scene, he’d been able to get out of the depressed mind space he’d woken up in earlier, but as soon as he saw Gil, that all went down the drain, and he found himself struggling to keep his composure. He hid his hands in his pockets as he approached him and the rest of the group.

*

Gil has known Malcolm for over 20 years, since he was a child, and has therefore become very good at reading him. Lately, every time he showed up, there seemed to be something wrong with him, and Gil felt so useless and so conflicted each of those times.

When Malcolm was a child, there was more he could do, because adults are expected to take care of children, and they can tell them what they can and cannot do, but even then, his influence was limited, because Malcolm wasn’t _his_ child. He had no right to intervene with Jessica’s parenting style, other than sharing his very much unwanted opinions and advices, no matter how questionable he might have found it.

And now, Malcolm was an adult, and even though Gil was technically his boss, he couldn’t father him anymore, no matter how much he wanted to. Even Jessica couldn’t mother him like she used to. While he used to be an obedient child, the more independent he grew and the more time he spent away from his mother, the further away he got from the obedient child he once was. Perhaps that was what was so grating on Jessica, and why she couldn’t deal with him as well, now that he was a grown man.

It wasn’t too hard to tell if something was wrong with Malcolm, but when one’s in a perpetual state of “something’s wrong,” one had to be able to distinguish different levels of wrong. How unwell is Malcolm today? Is it the sleep deprivation, the malnourishment, the nightmares, or some sort of a combination of either of those? Over the past month he had to find a way to be able to tell, and he thought he might be getting a hang of it. Things like sleep deprivation and malnourishment had fairly common symptoms across the people affected by them, so those were easy to tell. Psychological reactions were less consistent between people, but he knew Malcolm well enough to be able to identify them. Aside from the trembling hands, Malcolm’s tell was the almost feral _fear_ in his eyes.

The look he gave him when their eyes met for a brief moment that morning at the crime scene was of more than just fear. Malcolm looked like he was about to cry, but he swallowed it down and walked closer, hands tucked in his pockets, clearly to mask their trembling. His skin was unusually pale, except for the dark tint around his baggy eyes, and if Gil had to guess, he got just enough sleep for a night terror and not a wink more.

After about the fifth time Gil or someone else from the team had greeted him with some variation of “you look like shit,” Malcolm had politely, although clearly frustratedly, told them that he doesn’t need that pointed out each time and that it was getting a bit old. So, Gil refrained from pointing it out as he approached.

‘Morning,’ he said, then, more quietly, he asked: ‘did you have breakfast?’

Malcolm shook his head, walking straight past Gil and over to the dead body. There was a weird tension to his motions, like everything he did was forced and deliberate. Throughout their examination of the body of the victim and their consequent discussion of the case, he retained his usual, professional demeanour, but he seemed distant, and seemed to be avoiding looking directly at Gil. Even his smiles at Edrisa’s antics seemed fainter and shorter-lived than his usual, polite beaming.

It was later, at the precinct, when the two of them were alone in Gil’s office and Malcolm was avoiding looking into his eyes that he brought it up.

‘Kid, you need to talk to me,’ he said. Malcolm’s eyes flitted closer to Gil’s, stopping somewhere around his shoulder, and he bit his lip. Gil took that as his cue to keep talking. He knew that, even though it didn’t seem like it, he could get to the bottom of this, because Malcolm _wanted_ help, he just needed some reassurance, something to let him know that he was clear to open up about it all. ‘It was another nightmare, wasn’t it? That bad?’

Malcolm nodded, his eyes now moving to look somewhere around Gil’s chin. Gil took that as a sign of progress. It was time for the good old “reassuring hands on his shoulders” manoeuvre. Gil squeezed both of Malcolm’s shoulders and dipped his head so their eyes were at the same level.

‘It’s ok,’ he said. ‘You can tell me.’

This was it. When Malcolm’s eyes finally met his, he only saw them for about a second, filling with tears, before Malcolm stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Gil’s torso, his face pressed against the space between his neck and his shoulder.

Gil was absolutely stunned for a couple of seconds, taken completely aback by the unexpected and highly uncharacteristic hug, but he managed to snap out of it enough to return it, gently stroking the back of Malcolm’s head. Malcolm let out a strangled sob as he adjusted his grip on the back of Gil’s jacket, and Gil swayed gently, telling him it was ok, he could let it out.

They stood like that for a good few seconds, Malcolm’s sobs gradually calming down, before he finally said a word. His voice sounded raspy and strained from crying.

‘It wasn’t a memory,’ he mumbled. ‘It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. You’re still here. I did save you.’

‘Oh Malcolm,’ Gil sighed, eyes wandering to the shuttered windows of his office, as Malcolm’s face was still very much buried in his shirt, no doubt soaking it. It all started to make sense now, and his heart ached for him, but at the same time, he was touched.

He was touched, because the boy that saved him, and the boy he saved in return, had grown up to be such a brilliant young man, a damaged man that fought tooth and nails against the demons of his past, one that held him at such a high regard. He was touched that Malcolm trusted him enough to let him see him at his most vulnerable, and the implications of the nightmare that brought this out of him being one about losing him weren’t lost on him.

‘Yes, you did,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, you did.’

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!  



End file.
